We are informed that the Future is Female. In “The Future is Female”: Women’s March in Boston 2018, for example, the future governor of Maskachusetts is described as having worn a shirt reading “The Future is Female”. Such T-shirts may be found at retailers in MA: All genders are … | Continue reading
Canadian wildfire smoke has reached Manhattan, thus resulting in media hysteria regarding what you might think was a dog-bites-man story (filth in New York City). As measured by METARs at LaGuardia, this was the worst official report: KLGA 071908Z 31018G22KT 1SM R04/P6000FT HZ … | Continue reading
“Florida arranged migrant flights to California, where officials are considering legal action” (CBS): Florida officials confirmed Tuesday that the state arranged the chartered flights that took migrants to Sacramento on Monday and last Friday, generating outrage from California … | Continue reading
Science v2021: Babies and young children study faces, so you may worry that having masked caregivers would harm children’s language development. There are no studies to support this concern. Young children will use other clues like gestures and tone of voice. Babies and young … | Continue reading
Who here is passionate about golf as a spectator sport? “The Saudi Kingdom has gained control of the sport a year after starting LIV Golf” (Daily Mail). Are you ready to travel to the kingdom of sand to watch the sport of grass? As of 2021, there were 5 public golf courses in Sau … | Continue reading
Who’s ready to sign up for Disney’s Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser experience/hotel? Compared to the price of Taylor Swift tickets, $6,000 for a family of four for two nights is a bargain. Fox Orlando explains: Touted as a “first-of-its-kind immersive experience” Disney opened … | Continue reading
It’s Pride Month once again in our MacArthur Foundation-built New Urbanism development. The above young people have graduated from the regular high school, the nerd (“STEM”) high school, and the talented (“arts”) high school (funded by a former MIT Board member, Alex Drey … | Continue reading
Today is World Environment Day (which means we can ignore the environment for 364 days per year, cranking up the A/C in our pavement-melting SUVs?). What are you doing to mark this milestone? Here’s Facebook back in May enforcing orthodoxy by augmenting one of my posts: Every … | Continue reading
According to Governor French Laundry, Florida is one of the worst places on Planet Earth. Some examples… books are banned, speech is restricted, nobody can vote against Republicans, and “women” are criminalized: We’re about to celebrate Independence Day — but Freedom is under a … | Continue reading
We’re getting into the summer travel season. For folks in small planes fleeing South Florida, Chattanooga, Tennessee is a reasonable first overnight. KCHA is a huge airport with a great FBO: The surrounding Appalachian Mountains are scenic, but don’t interfere with instrument … | Continue reading
A cousin is a Scientist (i.e., a physician). He is married to a woman with some Deplorable and Deplorable-adjacent relatives. He recently described getting into a fight with the in-laws in late 2021. He and his wife spent some time in their secure all-Democrat enclave with a filt … | Continue reading
An elite white Democrat told a friend about her elite white Democrat nephew who managed to get into an Ivy League college with a story about having been mugged in New York City. With some coaxing and examples, my friend managed to get the following out of GPT-4…. TITLE: Echoes o … | Continue reading
Happy Pride Month (last year it was officially “A Proclamation on “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, And Intersex Pride Month”, according to Joe Biden). From state-sponsored CBC… “The future is trans: As Transgender Awareness Month comes to an end, what are our next st … | Continue reading
“Wait, La Guardia Is Nice Now? Inside New York’s $25 Billion Airport Overhaul” (New York Times, July 2022): The first airport to be completed will be La Guardia, where Delta Air Lines has just opened a gleaming, $4 billion terminal … already won an award as the best new airport … | Continue reading
One of the joys of New York was casual access to great art museums. Post-coronapanic, however, access is no longer so casual. They’re on the dreaded timed ticket system. The lobby contains neon art by Eric Adams: What other messages do we see in the Renzo Piano building … | Continue reading
On this Memorial Day I’d like to celebrate the memory of William Lewis Herndon, author of Exploration of the Valley of the Amazon and captain of the SS Central America, a commercial ship with a U.S. Navy captain that sank off the Carolinas during a hurricane in 1857, resulting in … | Continue reading
A 24-year-old driver in today’s Indy 500 race is our neighbor here in Jupiter, Florida: Kyle Kirkwood. Like us, he drives a Honda! (Our Honda seats 8 comfortably and is therefore superior.) Who’s watching the Indy 500? How’s our neighbor doing? | Continue reading
A modest-sized Jasper Johns painting of the American flag sold for $36 million in pre-Biden money (New York Post, 2014). A hedge fund billionaire might have paid $110 million for one in 2010 (NYT). Here’s a (priceless) triple-flag version at the Whitney: Johns is 93, possibly … | Continue reading
I was talking to an elderly Bay Area tech industry worker at a wedding in New York City recently (see Abortion care as a wedding gift?). He said that he has switched to thicker-soled shoes for commuting via BART due to the high density of used hypodermic needles and bodily fluids … | Continue reading
New Yorkers were among the most eager followers of Science. Two-year-olds were ordered to wear masks until June 2022, for example (NYT). Science required poor kids to keep wearing them (see “Toddler mask mandate remains for federally funded NYC programs” (New York Post, June 17, … | Continue reading
Folks: Although there is no place better to spend the summer than South Florida, I’m heading to the Mountain West on Saturday. For altitude adjustment, the first two nights will be spent in Bozeman, Montana. If anyone lives out there and wants to meet, please email (philg@mit.edu … | Continue reading
Because I voted for Bernie I wear progressive eyeglasses. These fix a touch of adolescent myopia and astigmatism (for distance vision) and old-guy-needs-reading-glasses on the lower portion. To show my support for our 2SLGBTQQIA+ brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters, these are … | Continue reading
After 3 years of operation, Clubhouse has a 5,000-user/room limit. Zoom offers video as well and limits to 1,000 users for their high-end subscriptions (another 49,000 can listen passively). Elon Musk tried to push the everyone-can-talk-to-everyone software frontier out to 500,00 … | Continue reading
Checking in on the rainbow flag religion during a recent visit to one of its sacred places: New York City. The celebration begins at Newark Airport, Terminal C: (Note the possibility that this reflects a charitable donation by the “All Gender” family, just as the “Dolby Family … | Continue reading
I’ve long yearned for a state-by-state map that has similar “excess death” data to what Our World in Data delivers for countries (no-lockdown no-mask-order Swedes holding steady at 5%, substantially lower than the countries celebrated for their police- and military-enforced lockd … | Continue reading
I got on the subway at the Broadway-Lafayette stop where Jordan Neely died (Wikipedia). At Houston and Broadway, a block west of the station: Some photos the station (note the fancy new credit card reader that can collect a fare from a standard Visa card): I’m wo … | Continue reading
I traveled to Manhattan and Brooklyn earlier this month for a family event (see Abortion care as a wedding gift?), my first trip to NYC since June 2021. This post is for young people thinking of settling in the city. I stayed with friends who live in NYU faculty housing just sou … | Continue reading
Science proves that cardiac arrest cannot be caused by a COVID attempted vaccine. But Science also proves that we can never be killed by COVID-19 if we have been injected with at least 4 (or 5? or 6?) COVID shots. Therefore, we can move on to worrying about ways to die other than … | Continue reading
Our local public schools run fundraising events in which parents are urged to dine at particular restaurants on particular nights, with 10 percent of the revenue funneled back to the schools. At one of these events, a television was tuned to NBA TV. The fine print at bottom … | Continue reading
“NYC lost 5.3% of its population — nearly a half-million people — since COVID, with most heading South” (New York Post, May 18): The US Census Bureau revealed Thursday that the Big Apple’s population is 5.3% lower than it was when the novel coronavirus first hit the country. Ov … | Continue reading
New York Democrats opened a one-year window for 30-year-old sexual assault allegations recently so that E. Jean Carroll could sue Donald Trump for attacking her in a New York department store at some point in the mid-1990s (as Toucan Sam points out, the plaintiff’s inability to r … | Continue reading
We have a couple of iPad Mini 2s that were introduced in 2013, model number MF575LL/A (64 GB and T-Mobile LTE). If memory serves, these came with a free lifetime low-speed T-Mobile connection (though right now it seems not to be working; maybe it needs to be reactivated?). Checki … | Continue reading
Donald Trump recently lost $5 million to a plaintiff at a trial in which there was no physical evidence, but only some dramatic testimony from a plaintiff and her confederates (#BelieveWomen). Let’s see how good we are at detecting liars. First, an example from a patent trial whe … | Continue reading
“Fed researchers: $15 minimum wage in Minneapolis and St. Paul boosted pay — but cost jobs” (MinnPost.com): The push to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour in both Minneapolis and St. Paul has successfully boosted the average worker’s hourly pay in both cities, but it has als … | Continue reading
How about this idea for an Arduino project… a puck that can be quietly stuck to the back of a friend’s TV when you’re visiting. After a 72-hour delay, the puck begins emitting the dialog that Winston Smith heard from the telecreens in 1984. An example: ’Attention! Your attentio … | Continue reading
I was chatting with a guy who manages private jets for a variety of billionaires. Is he hiring pilots who were first officers at regional airlines? “No,” he responded. “I hire 65-year-old airline captains because they won’t quit on me.” He can’t keep younger pilots because making … | Continue reading
Day 4 of a Robinson R44’s life after release from the factory… Due to low clouds, we didn’t rush to get out of Destin, Florida, a beach town developed with the same attention to aesthetics as Ocean City, Maryland. I posted the above images to Facebook, which added a remind … | Continue reading
Third post in a series… We were sorry to leave the luxurious environment of Galaxy FBO at KCXO (north of Houston), but a massive multi-day system of thunderstorms was coming in so we flew through some rain and under low clouds to escape east. First stop was KCWF in Lake Charles … | Continue reading
After we had finished registering voters in El Paso, we headed east along Interstate 10. Here we are parked on the “pad of shame” at Fort Stockton: (As with self-checkout, self-service aircraft fueling is where I learn that there are no jobs with required skill levels lower th … | Continue reading
Today is the day that Donald Trump’s cruel Title 42 policy was supposed to end, enabling more than 7 billion humans to enter the U.S. and then live here for 10+ years as they await their first asylum court hearing. (CNN) (Trump’s immigration policy was intolerably racist, which i … | Continue reading
Coronapanic revisionists have at least the following pillars of faith: Florida was locked down New York was never locked down (see the middle of this post) Nobody ever said that COVID-19 vaccines prevented infection and transmission Marjorie Taylor Greene, for example, was … | Continue reading
Piston-powered airplanes subject pilot and passengers to unpleasant vibration. Battery-electric airplanes have minimal range. There have been some successful applications of Wankel rotary engines in aircraft. The homebuilt folks have had some success with Mazda RX-7/RX-8 engine … | Continue reading
New York Democrats opened the hunting season on Donald Trump on November 24, 2022 (CNN describes how the law was changed to open a one-year window with no statute of limitations for sexual assault) and E. Jean Carroll has now won $5 million despite no precise memory of when the l … | Continue reading
Headlines are packed with stories about major retailers shutting down stores in San Francisco and distressed office towers. At the same time, we know that folks in the Bay Area are passionate about social justice and welcoming migrants (San Francisco has been a sanctuary city sin … | Continue reading
Signs from Alabama’s Cheaha State Park, within the Talladega National Forest, explaining how Native Americans and Europeans came to be in the area: “Native Americans were the first people to colonize the Cheaha Mountain area.” and “Europeans left an established life and jou … | Continue reading
Light airplanes are still at near-historic values, at least in nominal dollars, which seems paradoxical given that their utility for transportation has been greatly reduced by Americans refraining from work. Airplanes, with their 1950s technology and low production numbers, requi … | Continue reading
I made it up to Titusville, Florida to watch the 6th Falcon Heavy launch. It was scheduled for a one-hour window starting at 7:29 pm so the Kennedy Space Center folks couldn’t be bothered to stay open and sell $250/person tickets for an up-close view. The wind was gusting to 30 k … | Continue reading
Perhaps of interest to stupid people who have purchased houses instead of renting professionally-maintained apartments… I asked ChatGPT about a few recent homeowner challenges and it struggled. A few minutes on YouTube and one can learn that the Bosch E25 error code means that s … | Continue reading